What is ironic is that the actual Mayan calendar from which the doooomsday date was plucked out of the aether by a junkie and a new ager separately but near simultaneously and in each case a serious error of logic was committed.
The Mayan type calendar is cyclical, and contains many cycles- recombining what the mainstream scholars call "gods", combined with "colours", animals and plants. This level of scholarship is much the same as saying that the letter A means tent.
In simple terms, the end of the cycle countenanced this December, ends a processional astronomical calculation. Then a new procession begins. There is a significant set of scientific data, now adopted by second rate "researchers" in the sciences having had sufficient time to integrate the original real research from "non-scientists" who did all the real work.
What this processional data indicates, and why the ancients cared about it so much, has nothing to do with magic or the fictional versions of ancient cultures (always all about "gods", "religion", "priesthoods" and so on, even though some prominent ancient cultures HAD NO WORD FOR GOD. And for that matter HAD NO PRIESTS. Scribe =/= priest) and everything to do with calculations relating to events in the cosmos which impact climate, tectonics and radiation levels (leading to mutational rates / oncogenetics) here on Earth. The effort required, even for civilisations with technology exceeding our own, was significant. The warning from the stars that the ancient monuments contain (along with so much more) were practical creations, intended to commemorate the lives lost (presumably in their millions) as well as pointing to when such disasters might return. There's nothing mystical in that, it's the basis of many predictive sciences to look at past cycles with something more than a mindless uniformitarian bent.
But not end on an ascerbic note:
1. see if you can see the astral spider (cf Nazca) in the centre of the "Mayan" calendar stone... Spider "demons" from "the stars" were a genuine mesoamerican belief, or at least something believed to exist- spider webs drifting at night seemed to "prove" the existence of these awesome creatures
2. people see past rather than focus on the ghastly nature of the illustrations, similar in kind and possibly even directly culturally linked to those of eg ancient Tibet- half eaten heads, raw severed heads, cooked severed heads and so on. This sort of illustration has a long esoteric tradition and is quite a preoccupation of secret Tibetan "Buddhism".
3. It's probably not generally known by anyone but as luck would have it the Antikythera difference engine cogs map to the equivalent "wheels" of the ancient mesoamerican calendar. Given that a significant part of the mesoamerican calendar was Venusian, it's a bit odd that the presumptive European origin of the Antikythera mechanism maps the same apparently highly culturally specific information. And of course as far as we know no one was planning a rocket to Venus etc. in 500BC-100AD so any preoccupation with Venus is odd itself, despite the "Type B" armchair experts rationalisations of their own irrational explanations of continuity errors...
4. note the four "evangelists", "direction stars", "cosmic beasts" and so on- surrounding the central figure.
